reinforcements

Recruiting The Burl to help sort out mom's stuff was a stroke of genius, I must say.
Genius born of desperation still counts, right?

An uninvolved cohort disrupts hidden gravity fields of family attachment and keeps everything moving forward. If I get snared by cards from a Christmas 30 years gone or a pile of beaded leather hippy purses from mom's (officially redacted) roach clip era, Burl is there to exclaim in horror over a jar of olives that expired ten years ago or brandish something from the kitchen cupboards and ask me "antique or junk?"

We trucked 20 bags of garbage to a dumpster last night.

Things mom had a lot of

televisions.
4 sets in a one bedroom apartment.

expired spices.
I filled a 30 gallon trash bag with stuff from her pantry. I kept one 50 year old tin of Schilling Pumpkin Pie Spice as a memento.

empty perfume bottles.
Collected they filled a shoebox.

ancient bars of soap.
Emptying out her dresser I unearthed at least 20 bars of soap. some, like the worn tan fleur de lis she put out when we had visitors, I remember from my childhood.
Apparently no-one was brave enough to use it.

old dolls.
Presumably immigrants from the estates of my great grandmother and grandmother.
Their creepy Twilight Zone aura of menace argues for the incinerator, but the voice in my head whispering Ebay...Ebay...Ebay... mounts a compelling defense.

pictures
After sorting the relevant bits I was left with roughly seven feet of photo albums and a banker's box full of unbound pictures. She was inordinately fond of blurry landscapes and underexposed interiors.

self help/diet books
These were hard for me.

note to future generations:
If you're serious about your mental health spring for a good therapist, and no matter how much you obsess about weight you're still gonna die.